Your Project Management Coach: Best Practices for Managing Projects in the Real World

Chapter 8

Building a Schedule

By now, you and your team have identified the project work to be done in the work breakdown structure (WBS). You've estimated how much time each work package or task will take. You've identified the types and numbers of resources you need to carry out those tasks and how much they'll cost for the project.

When you build the project schedule, you take these ingredients and put them all together. Using a Gantt chart or network diagram, you link and sequence related tasks from the beginning to the end of the project and identify when tasks should start and finish. If you have any date constraints, you add those to the schedule and make the necessary adjustments. When you assign resources — either specific or generic — to tasks, you adjust the schedule further to account for resource availability in a normal workday.

Finally, you review the resulting schedule and see if it meets the expectations of the project sponsor, customer, and other stakeholders in terms of the project finish date, cost, and other objectives. If necessary, you can optimize the schedule with a variety of techniques to achieve targets for finish date, cost, and resource allocation. While optimizing in this way, you work with the inevitable trade-offs among scope, time, and cost, as well as resource usage, quality, and risk.

Note

This chapter covers the basics of building a project schedule that apply to many scheduling methods, including critical path method (CPM), critical chain ...